06 August 2025 | Commencement Lecture
Jindal School of Government and Public Policy and
Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities
OP Jindal Global University
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WHY DID YOU HAVE TO WRITE THIS NOW?
The Predicaments and Persistence of a Journalist and Writer
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This is not just the first PPE commencement lecture but also my first commencement lecture. I have done a number of talks over the years from a variety of forums, but as a commencement lecture this is my first. There are many models of commencement lectures but I will stick to a moderately serious variety. I will not try to entertain you because I know you are all sufficiently entertained. I will also not try to inspire you because you are all sufficiently inspired, if not you wouldn’t be sitting here today. But what I WILL attempt during the course of this 40-minute lecture is to get you to reflect, if possible, on a string of ideas that may be familiar and unfamiliar.
I don’t wish to pontificate and judge the political and intellectual happenings around us, but place the complexity of many things that consume us today through a very personal journey of my books. I wouldn’t be picking examples from my three decades of journalism because there would be far too many examples that would embrace the exclamation that the topic of the day suggests. There is a question mark in the printed title, but I forgot to add an exclamation.
At the end, the only take away I intend from this lecture is to encourage a dogged pursuance of what you think is right and just, a pursuit of truth that you have deliberated through good reason and warm emotion.
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Many years ago, in February 2017, I had read a piece in The Guardian on how the Oxford PPE had pervaded British political and public life for years. The piece written by Andy Beckett began very tediously to establish its point: “Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.”
It goes on that way listing more than two dozen Oxford PPE names, and connecting it to happenings in Britain at the time, before stating: “More than any other course at any other university, more than any revered or resented private school, and in a manner probably unmatched in any other democracy, Oxford PPE pervades British political life. From the right to the left, from the centre ground to the fringes, from analysts to protagonists, consensus-seekers to revolutionary activists, environmentalists to ultra-capitalists, statists to libertarians, elitists to populists, bureaucrats to spin doctors, bullies to charmers, successive networks of PPEists have been at work at all levels of British politics – sometimes prominently, sometimes more quietly – since the degree was established 97 years ago.” (That was in 2017, now over a hundred years ago).
Therefore, when I am speaking to the first batch of the Jindal PPE students, I am conscious that I may be speaking to future prime ministers, cabinet ministers, civil servants, economists, environmentalists, editors, policy wonks, top academics and all those who may be steering the destiny of our nation in the near future. I wish you all great luck learning at this very fine institution, from very fine teachers, and for your future that already seems to be forming brightly and brilliantly. May your PPE course too gain similar influence and impact that the Oxford PPE gained in the last century.
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There are two characters who repeatedly came to mind when I wrote this lecture. They somewhat symbolized dogged pursuance and persistence, clutching to their heart what they thought was fair and what they thought had the ability to bend the paths of history. Both of them were Indians who were celebrated in the West but largely ignored in their own country. Both of them got long profiles in the New Yorker magazine 40 years apart.
The one who came early was JJ Singh, in the 1940s, without whom the Luce-Cellar Act would not have been passed in the United States during the Truman years. That Act had made Indians eligible to become American citizens and seek permanent residency. The New Yorker profile on him in March 1951 was titled, ‘One Man Lobby’. His capacity to line up the most influential Americans for his cause, from senators, writers, Nobel laureates to future first ladies and presidents was unmatched. He had done this when the Indian diaspora in the United States was just around 4000 people. An insignificant number to have any influence. There is an entire chapter on him in my new book, The Conscience Network.
The one who came later was Akumal Ramachander. The New Yorker piece on him in December 1985 was titled, A Strange Destiny. He had a found fame because he had discovered an abstract expressionist painter called Harold Shapinksy, which forced the history of modern art to be rewritten. Salman Rushdie and Tariq Ali had made a Channel 4 film on Akumal, and Rushdie had lovingly called him a ‘pest’. The epic pursuance and persistence of JJ Singh and Akumal, amidst all predicaments, impediments and cynicism had changed the course of history. This lecture is perhaps a small tribute to them as individuals and their little celebrated creative spirits. While JJ Singh passed away in 1975, Akumal Ramachander passed away a few months ago.
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Let us now jump straight into the lecture, which I should start by making a tiny confession. I put the topic of my lecture to vote at home with my wife and kids. It so turned out that I was in a pathetic minority of one, arguing endlessly for its relevance, and undemocratically giving it final approval. My wife was outright cynical with the topic; my son was somewhat skeptical, he was making references to other commencement lectures where speakers made their audiences dance, or offered outrageous and contrarian advise; and my cat-loving daughter made some vague reference to TS Eliot’s Growltiger.
I could not make the connection that my daughter was attempting. I looked up the Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and a line about the bravo cat that travelled on a barge, said, “From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims, / Rejoicing in his title of ‘The Terror of the Thames’.” I still couldn’t get my daughter’s cheeky fling at me. I conveniently thought that it was not just generational gap but a generational gorge, and moved on.
Despite the loss of the confidence vote at home, it is my persistence (which you will soon learn is a euphemism for journalistic pigheadedness) that made me bring this topic right to you, today. I sincerely hope that it will pass muster here, and even if it doesn’t, be warned the usual caveats are in place. That’s how journalists work.
I am not sure if writer’s work the same way, perhaps they are far more circumspect, far more doubting of their talents, perhaps they erase more than they write, but the author in me is dominated by the bravado of a journalist, trained to seek headlines and sensation. You must have heard of the phrase, ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’. It is attributed to Alexander Pope, the early 18th century English poet, but I always thought it was a Biblical phrase. Anyway, Alexander has Pope in his name, and was born to his father Pope (Alexander Pope Sr.), and no wonder it sounds Biblical.
Now that the tone has been somewhat set, and a rough estimation of possible failures has been made, let me tell you why I chose this topic. This question: ‘Why did you have to write this now?’ has been thrown at me at every bend of my journalistic career, and unfailingly, before, and during, the launch of each of my books. It has kind of become an emblematic phrase or a taunt, if you so wish to call it. Even when my latest book, The Conscience Network, was released a little over a month ago, the question was asked dutifully – Why did you have to write this now? It is another thing that I have learnt to masterfully ignore it.
In fact, at one of the events in Delhi when somebody asked me the question – ‘Why did you have to write this now?’, a question that not just threatened the sales of the book, but challenged my existence as a writer, I started speaking about the four different romances in the book. Romance in a story of dictatorship was enough to create confusion in decent measure, in the person and in the audience. If I had answered the question straight, I would be reducing my book to a banal statement, and if I could reduce the book to a statement then why did I have to write 600 pages of narrative history and con my publisher?
Initially, I would get all worked up and attempt to answer such a question, but I have gradually learnt to convert it into a rhetorical one in my mind. A rhetorical question can only invoke silence after it has been posed. I thought it was best to allow the one who poses the question to grumble for a while and go away.
I have learnt from experience that if one began to answer the question one would never write the next piece, the next column and the next book. What you want to write, only you should decide. You have to convince yourself with a touchstone that recognizes truth, reason, justice and professionalism. In summary you have to convince your conscience. I would not dare to leave out emotion in this reckoning because emotion always, ALWAYS, carries an alternate logic in its belly. The reason of the gut often gets into a conflict with the reasoning of the head, and that is very good for a journalist and a writer. It prevents you from becoming a Baba Ji, a godman, who pontificate with the sweeping certainty of the heavens, which neither of us can fact-check ever.
I sometimes feel that nobody is really bothered about your research, the long hours you have spent in the archives, and forget the elegance of the prose, what about the sheer physicality and loneliness of writing? I have learnt that readers often use the yardstick of comfort. The greater they are discomforted by your writing, the less likely they will acknowledge your piece or your book. They often seek endorsements to their living, their values, their beliefs, their predilections, their prejudices, and their patterns of thinking. They never want to begin all over again. They do not want to feel defeated. They never want to be told that they were wrong. It takes a real long time, and sometimes decades and generations, to get them to see the other side. They crawl slower than millipedes to the other side of opinion or truth.
It is perhaps this insight that has helped social media companies in the Silicon Valley to build algorithms to create the comfort of echo chambers and glorious bubbles that we have all now become victims of. In many ways, we are all now victims of targeted comfort building. Creating discomfort is bad business. Therefore, they try to establish the idea that the world is as you believe. That there is nothing significant outside of you really, and you therefore need to constantly pamper the comforts of your thinking and living.
These echo chambers and bubbles which are all about economics, attention spans, loops of obsession, webs of control, surrogate marketing and enormous profits have become a challenge to not just politics, but have also landed huge questions on the ancient tables of philosophy. However, the classic position remains that the greater the discomfort that thought creates, the greater the possibility of change. It is the greater accommodation of discomfort and diversity that leads to creativity, harmony and growth. I am sure that your PPE course is designed to teach you to tackle this discomfort and diversity of thought and living, which could bring about equanimous solutions. The topic of discussion today, about my writing, should only be an excuse to get at this larger thing, this enormous thing that bothers us.
Greory Doran, who was the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London came up with an idea of a short performance, a few years ago. It was to explore the famous lines from Hamlet, the eponymous play, where the prince gets into an epic dilemma and speaks the most celebrated lines in literature – ‘To be or no to be that is the question.’ So, he got nearly a dozen great actors, including Judi Dench, to deliver the line, each time with a different emphasis. They bantered and countered each other with the phrase in fun ways, and each time they altered the emphasis, the emotion changed, the points of anxiety changed and the meaning changed. Since there were so many interpretations, they asked themselves what should be THE interpretation. To resolve that dilemma, they got a real prince on stage, then Prince Charles now King Charles, to deliver the line. His emphasis was entirely different. At that point he seemed to be in an eternal wait to take the throne because his mother, Queen Elizabeth, was just not walking into the sunset. It was always the context and personal situation that decided the emphasis.
Why I recount this story, is to tell you that the question that I have put at the center of today’s talk – Why did you have to write this now? – similarly changes its colors, emotions and anxieties, with the change in emphasis and personal situation. It never ends the dilemmas, never finds an answer, never reaches a conclusion but with renewed stubbornness perpetrates the damn question. Although I said I do not answer that question anymore, I have hugely benefitted from repeatedly confronting that question. It has helped me understand my protagonists better and create a more meaningful purpose for my writing.
When I wrote the biography of HD Deve Gowda, India’s eleventh Prime Minister, my mother asked me this very question. When she asked the question there was only a diminishing hint of parental worry. She was not worked up or worried, but with a distinct insouciance, she asked: ‘Why did you have to write this now? People had begun to take you seriously.’ The sentence was never completed and there was no argument. She moved on to other things. She had not even opened the 600-page tome or held it in her hand. She had not known Deve Gowda, she had no specific complaints about him, she was neither interested in politics nor political lives, but she had borrowed every prejudice that there was, freely circulating in her circles, to ask the question. There was no curiosity, only outright dismissal.
Anyway, we’ll come to this biography later, but I hope you understand why it is important to not answer the question because it lays a horrendous trap, but it is also true that it sets you thinking. Many a times this question is posed like it was by my mother, with passivity and borrowed prejudice. It remains more a passing comment than a question but it sticks in the mind of the writer. I experienced a very similar commentary when I wrote the Rahul Gandhi book. Does he deserve a book was the most popular question, when they should have made an effort to find out what there was in the book.
Beyond the journalistic bounds and the writerly realm, as I have already hinted, this question has larger reverberations. It uncannily resonates during other conversations we make and other decisions that we may take during our lifetime. The contexts may differ but the template is unmistakably the same. Therefore, to this very genre of the question we are debating may belong the following questions too: Why did you have to marry now? Why did you have to quit your job now? Why did you have to fall in love with that person? Why did you have to go the market now? What did you have to make that call now? Why did you have to post that on social media now? Why did you have to get into politics now? Someone may even turn around and ask you tomorrow, or later today, or may have already asked you yesterday: Why did you have to take the PPE course now?
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After all this meandering and generalizations, let us arrive at the specifics. When I published my first book in 2008, Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue: The Anxieties of a Local Culture, I thought I had done great service to Kannada, my mother tongue, and other regional tongues by speaking about their clipped existence in a world dominated by the English language. It was a pompous presumption and not uncommon for a young journalist and writer.
I had written in the introduction that, “This book is essentially about Kannada language, literature and culture. But then it also resonates the crisis being faced by practically hundreds of regional tongues across the globe. The diffidence, desperation and a sense of defeat in the speakers of these non-global tongues, I assume, is not dissimilar to that of Kannada.”
I had endeavored to build a larger argument in the book when I had said that it was quite a mystery as to why only the English language, or the West was seen as having the ability to create a culturally harmonious world. An extension of the civilizing mission that colonial powers mandated themselves with. Any effort, however sober and legitimate, of non-English tongues, to assert their identities was interpreted as ‘provincial’, ‘parochial’, ‘narrow’ and ‘chauvinistic’. It was very much like the stereotype that had been allowed to establish about the Islamic world, I had said.
All celebrations of cosmopolitanism, which have come to mean shedding one’s cultural self and specifics and merging with a certain techno-global identity, should be examined, I had argued. There is a larger spirit of cosmopolitanism or alternatively internationalism within each culture that needed to be recovered and presented to the world. I had argued through and through in the book for rooted cosmopolitanism so to say. I did not fully understand the implications of the phrase then but it came to somewhat define me many years later. A five-and-a-half-hour podcast in 2022, with Amit Varma, was titled, The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju.
Cosmopolitanism is not an idea confined to just one culture or one language or even one political system. This obsession with dwarfing and erasing of everything under a dangerously convenient idea of constructing oneness, is not the problem of narrow nationalisms alone, but of something that the so-called liberal streams have perpetrated as well. For instance, how did everything associated with English and the West get associated with a free world, with modern and cosmopolitan living? It is only now, in the last decade, have we seen the limitations of these claims as we witness the upheaval of western societies where extreme right-wing ideologies have challenged all that we had taken for granted since World War Two.
Therefore, I had argued that cosmopolitanism was at the core of all cultures. All cultures traditionally grew only because they could accommodate, appropriate and collaborate. Cosmopolitanism in that sense was a well-mediated space that allowed for constant social renewal and innovation. We have innovated for ages on this space as we started building global networks. This space was about creating a common ground, amidst all diversity, to co-exist. We often view this space as filled with elements of human commonality, universality. A well-mediated cosmopolitan space allows for cultures to not only retain their identity, but also confidently engage with the larger world.
Historically speaking, I had said in my first book that Kannada was able to guard its specific qualities while coexisting with Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian and Arabic languages. But it cannot be said that the same will continue with English. No language, which confronted Kannada, had modern and global interests like English. English had become a strong weapon of the neo-colonial powers. It will not destroy Kannada but would clip its wings. The imperial power will endeavour to retain the ethno-specificity of the language, but with an English countenance.
There should have not have been any problem with these arguments, but it upset a section of Kannada intellectuals, who asked, why did you have to write this now? When we are fighting back, when we are building a robust Kannada nation, why did you have to present us as weak in the eyes of the world. There is no crisis in our culture and there are no anxieties, and whatever exists, exists in your head, they said. It was linguistic pride that came in between their objective engagement with the idea, and it is that very pride that has continued to legitimize all violence in the name of language activism, and the continued glorification of an obsolete category called the linguistic state. They are unwilling to accept that the linguistic state had declined because globalization, economic opportunities and migration had altered the game permanently. When cultures refuse to accept reality, they get into a grand nostalgia which is reconstructed to suit the needs of the present. The view of what you were in the past is not often constructed on historical or archaeological evidence, but the politics and ideological demands of today. Even 17 years after the book was published the questions that I asked have only become more critical and complex, but the effort to understand it are still clouded by assertions of pride.
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When I published my next book in 2012, Pickles from Home: The Worlds of a Bilingual, I worked on expanding the idea of the rooted cosmopolitan. I wrote about negotiating not just two languages – English and Kannada, but two worlds – the regional and the pan-Indian, the national and the sub-national, the native and the global, the local and the universal etc.
Ian Jack, the remarkable British journalist, editor and author, who wrote the blurb for the book pointed out brilliantly, and accurately, that the phrase ‘local knowledge’ tended to suggest that non-local knowledge was somehow superior. ‘But what does the non-local amount to other than airline timetables?’ Ian Jack asked. He said the locality where I was embedded in, and was actively exploring, had as many human complexities as an entire continent. I had preferred to see the world in a grain of sand.
But more provocatively, I tried to say in the book, that a rooted cosmopolitan was someone who looked out from the window of one’s own culture, at life and color of the expansive world outside. This, I said, was different from saying that we should allow other influences to waft through our window. In the case of the former, that is looking out of the window, there was an active pursuance, and in the later, it was about passive reception, where you sat back and allowed things to flow in and randomly surround you. When one looked out of the window, one did so with a desirable measure of pride and critical insight about his/her own culture, but with little or reasonable prejudice against the other. What this position sought to achieve was the dissolution of chauvinism and reactionary behavior. We so often encountered violent clashes in India’s diverse linguistic regions where Kannadigas wanted to prove they were superior to Tamils; Maharashtrians wanted to drive away Biharis; the Assamese wanted to pack off Bengalis and the Bengalis wanted to chase away the Bangladeshis, etc., and all of them collectively opposed Hindi.
In the book, I had also been critical of the insularity that certain peculiar intellectual experiments in Kannada were fostering. There was an attempt being made to segregate ‘our’ knowledge and ‘their’ knowledge. Regret was being spread that Kannada had over the decades become a receiver of knowledge from outside, and not a giver of knowledge. It said that it was important to understand Karnataka through Kannada. In other words, there was a need to put in place a Kannada-way of looking at not just oneself but the wider world as well. I had challenged this dangerous line of thinking by asking if such marking of territories for knowledge would not shrink our world and vistas? If this was pragmatic at all when the human mind was such an enormous interface of innumerable experiences? And more importantly if this would not feed the right-wing fundamentalist fervor that was anyway growing. I had said that it was easy to unleash this project, but it would be very difficult to control its dynamics? The other danger was that nationalism and sub-nationalism had begun to mirror each other. They were independent cosmos at the time of Independence, with differing and benign worldviews. But in the nation-building process they had started looking like each other.
Interestingly, a couple of months after this book came out, I took over as the editor-in-chief of the largest circulated Kannada newspaper, which was part of the Times of India Group. It was expected of me to inject greater pride into the Kannada nation, but I was refusing to play the pride game. I was in fact cautioning against insularity and chauvinism. I was passionately arguing for rooted cosmopolitanism. All this went against the grain. Although it was not easy to designate me as anti-local or anti-Kannada, the question invariably came up in many circles as to why did I have to publish the book now? I was told my timing was all wrong. Some went further to suggest that to make amends, I should reorient the newspaper in such a fashion that it would lead to a shining new wave of Kannada pride. I did nothing of the sort, I chased universal dreams in the newspaper, did classical journalism making legitimate space for fact-based reportage and genuine commentary, and as a policy did not publish any chauvinist, or language activist who subscribed to violence. Yet, the circulation and advertising revenue of the newspaper rose every quarter to the delight of its proprietors.
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Around 2019-20, when it had become known that I was working on a biography of Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda, the cynical commentary reached my ears fairly regularly. It was a chatter that would not stop, but I had become skillfully deaf. There was great force in the questions that were circulating around me – Why do you have to write about him now? What has he done after all? Who remembers him after all? Wasn’t he prime minister for only 11 months? Wasn’t he a sleepy prime minister? Did you not find another prime minister to write about? Etc. When I began to work on the book, it had been a quarter century since he had been prime minister. A lot of people who appear big in history ensure their remembrance and legacy through the invisible scaffolding of executive power. Gowda that way held executive power for less than seven years in his political life that has spanned seven decades. For every part of those seven decades, he had remained politically relevant and that ability to remain relevant at all times, with or without executive power, the sheer longevity, the stamina and resilience needed to withstand the upheavals and rivalries of politics was what had primarily fascinated me as a biographer. But it so turned out from my research that his governance record, his policy-making record too was outstanding.
Contrary to the negativity that I was surrounded by, the documents that I was uncovering in the archives, and the Deve Gowda I was discovering in oral history interviews, were painting a very different picture. He had gone to Kashmir four times in 11 months when no prime minister had gone there for a decade; he had restored the democratic process there by conducting elections after a decade; he had allowed free access to the international press and diplomats to witness the elections; he had waived loans and revived power projects in the state to kickstart the economy, and he had risked his life by travelling in an open jeep to signal the improvement of the security situation in the state. The Western press had editorials, which said that there was a great chance to forge peace in the troubled valley as India now had a sincere prime minister at the helm. Gowda had also started a secret back channel with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief through his ENT surgeon, Dr. LH Hiranandani.
Similarly, the farmers of Punjab had named their finest variety of paddy after Deve Gowda, and there were warehouses filled with sacks of paddy with his name printed on it. This naming of the paddy had not happened through a government initiative, but was a voluntary act of the farmers. Gowda had also personally worked on the Farakka treaty in West Bengal, much to the anxiety of Jyoti Basu, and had permanently altered the politics of Bangladesh.
The insurgent groups in Nagaland were ever loyal to him because he was the only leader in Delhi who had seen their problem as a political one. He had managed a ceasefire there through secret negotiations in Zurich. He was loved in the North East because he was the only prime minister who had spent six straight days in all the states of the region, and declared for the first time a huge financial package running into thousands of crores to bring them to the national mainstream. He had set up for the first ever time a special cell in the PMO to directly monitor progress in the region. He had set up the Shukla Commission to develop a blueprint of development for the region, which has served as a template for all future governments.
Sunderlal Bahuguna in his interview to me praised the way Gowda handled the Tehri dam project and ensured its construction. Medha Patkar had told me that it was difficult to get another prime minister like him because of his sheer tolerance of dissent and protest. Gowda had also surrounded himself with some of the most credible bureaucrats and technocrats in the nation with unimpeachable integrity and credibility, that included Satish Chandran, TSR Subramaniam, JM Lyngdoh and APJ Abdul Kalam among others.
In Nani Palkivala’s budget speech of 2000 he had said that the 1997 budget was the best budget since Independence. But all the credit for that had accrued to Gowda’s finance minister, P Chidambaram. Chidambaram had become finance minister for the very first time under Gowda, and Gowda had made him finance minister against much opposition from the Left parties and other coalition partners. When one examined the cabinet papers closely it became very clear that it was Gowda who had pushed through a lot of reforms even when Chidambaram had been cautious and dissenting. It was Gowda who had after all revived the Delhi Metro project and given it financial closure, eleven years after it was conceived. After the Narasimha Rao years, when economic reforms had begun, Gowda had not disturbed the momentum of reforms. He had alternatively created a vision that continued with reforms but also kept a kept a welfarist balance, also an urban-rural balance. Besides, he put money in the hands of the middle class by drastically altering the personal income tax levels for the first time since independence. This balance he achieved held India in a good stead. His impetus to the agricultural sector and irrigational infrastructure ensured that rural India thrived. His Accelerated Irrigation Scheme was a landmark. The agricultural growth rate posted under him has not been matched to this day. No wonder the farmers of Punjab named a paddy variety after him. Yet the man had not just been ignored but had been made to appear like a village bumpkin who had whiled away his time on the chair. The truth and evidence were anything but that.
A political scientist who wrote a bestselling book in 1996 on the idea of India, even went to the extent of saying that India for the first time had a prime minister who neither knew English or Hindi. That was the very opening line in his book. That was untrue because not only had Deve Gowda medium of instruction in school and college was English, but the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library archives was full of letters that Gowda had written longhand in English to his colleagues in the Janata Party in the 1970s and the 1980s. He had conducted all his parliamentary business in English.
It was the great jurist Fali Nariman who had alerted me first to Gowda’s extraordinary talents as a great river basin planner and a master of water treaties. He had said he was not just a farmer prime minister but India’s first and only engineer prime minister. Indira Gandhi’s longtime advisor, HY Sharada Prasad, had told me that if Indira Gandhi knew as much constitutional law as Deve Gowda, she would not have clamped the Emergency. His local fights, his political games, his dynastic preferences, his political cunning and skullduggery were all there in varying measures, but then that was common to all politicians. There was vastly something more in him which had remained unexplored. After all he had become prime minister without pelf, pedigree or patronage.
Gowda was a total outsider to the power circles in New Delhi. He had come up the hard way as a son of a poor farmer in a nondescript Hassan village. When he had become prime minister people in the power circles, the Lutyens elite so to say, perhaps frowned because he did not look like them, speak like them or dress like them, but the common men and women of India had rejoiced his elevation. It was a clear indication to the nation that the democratic process in India was not rigged. It was an assurance that it had not been entirely captured by elites or dynasts. But this man had been forgotten and the reasons for that were many.
The fact that Gowda was the first Shudra prime minister had played a significant role in downplaying and dismissing him in the media, which was after all controlled by the upper castes. The caste and class issue, the linguistic disadvantage where Gowda did not speak Hindi (although perfectly understood it) and also did not speak Queen’s English were very much at play in the case of Gowda. All this, and more, formed the basis of the question – Why did you have to write his biography?
**
My next protagonist is Rahul Gandhi. I published a book on him in 2023. It was not a biography but a long essay, a political commentary on our times by placing him at the center. Unlike prejudice that surrounded Deve Gowda, I felt Rahul Gandhi was a victim of propaganda carried out by a very powerful ideological machine. I wanted to look at his political journey critically, observe the missteps in his journey, examine his privilege and his pain, the burdens he carried as a member of a powerful dynasty, sympathize with his literally caged existence, etc. I wondered if I could understand his unconventional political position through the examination of his life; his idealism; I asked if he was as politically naïve as he came across to be, and more than anything else I wanted to understand his reading of India, present and past, and how insightful it was.
When I wrote the book, there was not a single line in it that was unsubstantiated. It had a gentle exploratory tone and was not judgmental in nature. Of course, if you create a judgment by the manner in which you arrange your facts and arguments that is very different from the writer himself presenting his final reading so to say. The book encouraged readers to think through the words that he had spoken and the situations he had been in, and also situations he had created. One of the early readers of the book was a Buddhist priest, a Lama, high up in the Tibetan spiritual hierarchy. He felt so inspired that he sent two copies of the book to Rahul Gandhi and said this was the “most empathetic” piece of writing he had read on him.
One of the other readers was Prof. GN Devy, whom I deeply respect. He said that I had created a high standard in the genre called political life writing. He said, he couldn’t think of “another Indian who had achieved such excellence in the genre”. He also said that although I had written on Deve Gowda, Rahul Gandhi was “a particularly difficult protagonist in particularly difficult times”.
This was high praise. Yet, the liberal establishment, was indifferent to the book. I am conscious when I say establishment, because this establishment in recent years has mostly functioned as an extension of the Congress party. They have conveniently developed an argument that if the Congress party is not restored to power India may not remain a democracy. They have created a binary, very similar to the one that George Bush had created in the wake of 9/11, when he said: ‘With us or against us.’ They have progressively tried to dissolve the space for any argument, any correction, any sort of critical engagement. In this aspect they mirror their rivals with trolls and all.
When my book came out in August 2023, the 2024 general elections was fast approaching. The establishment thought that any kind of critical assessment, however fair, could damage the chances of the Congress returning to power. However, I had grown up in a journalistic tradition which held that it was not the problem of a journalist and a writer to rescue anybody. He/she was permanently in an adversarial space. It was not their job to be activists and campaigners to put somebody in power or push them out of their chair. The tradition expected us to just be relentless word machines with an active desire to antagonize all sides.
Therefore, this time too, the inevitable, yet familiar question came up: Why did you have to write this now? We thought you were on our side. They were judging the book, as they proverbially say, by its cover. Those who spoke said this loudly, but those who didn’t carried a smugness and indifference that ran deep. Their attitude challenged their own criticism of the Modi regime. That was marvelous irony that couldn’t be missed. It was indicative of something larger. It was about the nature of seeking power itself. Perhaps you will get to study more about it in your political philosophy classes.
I had also written in the book that Rahul Gandhi had increasingly been using the language of reclamation and restoration of a liberal past that had been lost. There was a grand assumption that everything was perfect in the past, under the Congress. This imagination was similar to the fantasies of a glorious past, arising out of deliberate distortions of history that the political right often wove together to reclaim India. I had quoted my teacher, Jeremy Seabrook, who had written in the context of Brexit: “The talk of ‘reclaiming’ the tradition of tolerance, openness and liberal thought is the language of restoration. In other words, it is a profoundly conservative project, because it seeks a reversal of what has happened, and wants to put back in place a status quo ante which appeared, for a long moment, enduring, but which in fact was demolished in the twinkling of an eye. It is not that those values have perished, or that ideals of social hope, fairness and decency are vanished from the world. It is simply those values are not there to be ‘recuperated’ or ‘recovered’ as though temporarily mislaid. They have to struggled for in renewed effort and pain; since their establishment are never definitively won, but always fought for afresh.” While Seabrook was making a case for a fresh struggle, I was of the opinion in the book that the Congress was deracinated and was fighting a cultural war without a cultural narrative. That is, it was fighting a battle of high emotions through low reason.
As regards the question as to why I wrote the book (I had anticipated the question from my Deve Gowda book experience), I said: “In my long journalistic career, I have come to realize that the ‘why’ question exists in many covert and overt forms, and at every step, my job has been to get past them. And doing so has never been about plain disruption, a certain contrarian-ness or about anarchic joy. It has been about a deeply felt moral imperative.”
Further, I said: “Books written or unwritten cannot be hidden away. Ideas have to be discussed threadbare for any form of victory or progress to sustain itself. Suppression is never a solution… what has to be written has to written not because there are going to be consequences as imagined or feared, but simply because books make nothing happen. Like the poet WH Auden said, ‘For poetry makes nothing happen’ but merely ‘survives in the valley of its making’. I have no illusions to what my writing may or may not do.”
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Finally, I will end with this lecture with a reference to my latest book which looks at how a Gandhian resistance was built internationally to Indira Gandhi’s emergency. The book’s action takes place in the United States, and it documents through an elaborate archival study how civil rights activists, Quakers, war resistors, Nobel laureates, senators, academics and ordinary Americans were roped in by a bunch of idealistic young Indians studying and working in the United States in the 1970s, to restore democracy in India. It is on how they eventually built a network of conscience to fight a dictatorship. More than making it an anti-Indira Gandhi book I was interested in the structure of the resistance, the structure of idealism and the transformation of the diaspora. But the ‘why now’ question cropped up immediately from liberal approval gangs. They asked: ‘Why write the book now about an Emergency that took place fifty years ago, when there is an undeclared Emergency now?’. I thought they were building a false moral equivalence.
I argued that first of all this was a book of history that had been written by accessing archival papers that had hitherto not been accessed. Next, I said Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was clamped 50 years ago. It happened at a different bend of history. The context and circumstances were different. The nuances of its implementation were different. The complexities of the present cannot be defined by using the crutches of the past entirely. That is what happens when moral equivalences are built – innocuously or deliberately. The past cannot be used to obfuscate the present, and similarly, the present cannot be used to obfuscate the past. These exercises are self-defeating for a democracy. The past can offer a reference but cannot become a complete analogy. Developing a measure for the present and future, using events in history, is not an unfamiliar exercise. It happens all the time either to serve the political exigencies of the present or to frame a genuine anxiety. However, we should be aware that such equivalences are also deep political and propaganda games, their phraseology is devious. I am of the view that the present should be judged as harshly as possible, but independently. The past cannot be cleverly used to negate the crimes of the present, similarly the present cannot be used to negate the crimes of the past. Can there not be independent indictments?
Noam Chomsky, after the 9/11 attacks in the US spoke about moral equivalence in an interview to the BBC. He spoke of it as a term of propaganda. He said it was invented to try to prevent us from looking at acts for which we are responsible. He offers examples. Just ask the question, who does it help when we build a false moral equivalence about the Emergency. We should argue for democracy at all times, a more robust one, not become part of anybody’s restoration project or power-seeking or power-retaining project.
There is no good time for any book or any writing. Therefore, I assume that instead of consulting the astrologers of doom, you have to keep writing and talking all the time. That is subversion, that is an antidote to authoritarian behavior, and that is true democratic engagement. It is the noise that lets everything and everybody survive.
I’ll end by quoting a poem, titled Young Poets, by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, one of my absolute favorites. Paara considered himself ‘anti-poet’ because he had total distaste for poetry’s pomposity and pretenses. After his recitations, he would say, “I’ll take back everything I have said.” I feel tempted to say so now, after all that I have said, but let it be. Here’s the poem:
“Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.”
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I once again wish you all the very best for your future. THANK YOU.
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